IP/optical integration typically results in cost savings, but maintaining service availability is also essential when measuring total return on investment (ROI). An analysis of 3 modes of operation found multi-layer protection and restoration to be the most cost efficient while meeting availability requirements.

Public safety professionals require the highest level of reliable, multimedia mobile communications to enhance their operational effectiveness. And while standard based long term evolution (LTE) provides the most cost-effective and secure way to support these broadband communications, transitioning to this new technology will demand a complex technical, operational, and business evolution for the public safety community.

Why LTE – and why now?

Public safety communications are at a turning point. The most urgent events – planned and unplanned – require more than mission-critical voice to improve first responders’ efficiency. Real-time imagery, video, geo-localization, and high-speed access to private cloud-based information and applications are becoming essential to fulfill first responders’ missions.

Existing private mobile radio (PMR) systems have limited capabilities to deliver this, because they were designed to primarily support narrowband mission-critical voice.

For LTE, it’s a different story. LTE can complement existing PMR networks to dramatically enhance operational effectiveness and coordination within a secure infrastructure shared by cooperating agencies.

OpenStack isn’t an as-is solution for telco network functions virtualization (NFV) infrastructures. OpenStack is an open-source cloud management technology that provides many of the capabilities needed in any NFV environment. And this has prompted interest among many telco service providers.

But to realize the full benefits of NFV, service providers need NFV platforms that provide additional capabilities to support distributed clouds, enhanced network control, lifecycle management, and high performance data planes.

Verizon Wireless and Skype provided a model for the VoIP provider to meet the wireless operator, but the model is probably not how must carriers will meet.

Next week we are running a webinar about Voice over LTE [VoLTE] which is an interoperabilty standard that the carriers are looking to deploy complying with the 3GPP architecture.

While other proposals have been out there, the VoLTE group represents the scale and overall perspective of the GSMA carrier membership.

It's a SIP based solution using the IMS standard, so in the end it may be that only the larger operators are going to interconnect. However it may be that because of this common platform new services will be available to third parties.

These are the questions that I am looking to get answers to when I attend the webinar March 18th and 11 EDT.

At Mobile World Congress Vittiorio Colao the CEO of Vodafone made mention of the fact that regardless of what smart phone your were using over 80% of the time was using Google.

This pointed to the latest love hate the carriers have with Google, but they have a history of not liking any of the computing partners. Apple got to watch the wholesale app announcement with about half of the 24 carriers being their partners pledging to work with LG, Samsung and Sony to build an app market.

Likewise Microsoft has a long history of trying to bring smarts at a time when the network had little capacity for computing.

However, in these times when wireless broadband is an imperative to the carriers the strategies of come one come all, have proven less than successful.

Its clear that mobile markets are going be more like computing the in years past and the company's success will be based on finding ways to partner without losing brand to the consumer, or without using the brand in the application (as in M2M).

One thing that has not risen to the surface in MWC this week is e-readers. The group is strangely silent, either because they are retooling after the iPad or because the deals are not that valuable to the carriers.

Whatever the reason, the computing devices are coming more and more often and it will take more than an app store to catch the consumer's attention.

Supercomm was cancelled for 2010. While it would interesting to talk about this from the conference side, I will make the assumption that other people will take that opportunity and try to talk about it from a different perspective.

CES was hoping and the buzz was around various forms of wireless use. Ford with Sync, Microsoft with KIA, Wireless devices and devices using wireless were all around most of them Internet enabled.

Mobile World Congress is going on in Barcelona and it's expected to do well next week.

I want to point out that these events are following the money which is no longer about the network its about the consumers freedom of choice.

As congress and the FCC contend with the legacy of the PSTN the new network is flourishing and its not about wireless its about customer choice. The wireless world may still have the same issues facing it that their fixed line brothers faced. Brough Turner points out that over 90% of the packets on any network head for the Internet.

If I were at the FCC I would be ready to advocate that its time to treat all networks as if they were accessing the Internet. Looking at competition not based on the technology but on the services and the primary services. Voice, video and data are probably going to converge at some point as well with the over the top (internet) model

Legacy service providers are looking for protection, but government should praise itself for enabling the competitive landscape we are heading for rather than embedding old rules into the new environment.

In these days of government bail outs its hard to see what is the economic downturn versus technological progress.

If the goal of net neutrality is to support the progress, I would contend it's to dynamic a market to codify. If its to protect the applications from abuses by the legacy networks, I am not sure its needed.